Liquid Gold

To celebrate a 'real' summers morning, I took my breakfast outside into the garden. The flowers are alive with bees and butterflies. Four Buzzard chicks were circling above me with their parents dropping food for them from great heights. It's one of their first lessons in hunting and in bright blue skies. The female kestrel has been hunting over the adjacent field and the Jackdaws and Crows are perching on every spare fence post. It's such a delight!

I decided that a day like this requires something a little special, replaced the marmalade and pulled out my very last bit of honey comb from the old hives that had to go south.
I saw the liquid gold run as I cut off the waxy caps and a little bee came to inspect. Camera time!

I often wonder if nature has ever produced a better design. Each cell is the same, perfect hexagonal structure, which has been built by bees for a million years. Within each cell is a bounty of honey, which is one substance no man has ever managed to successfully reproduce artificially. Before the commercial advent of cane and beet sugar, honey was the only sweetener available to man.

Although it is assumed that man has kept bee's in structures for 5000 years, it's only since the 19th Century that man has learnt to give bees movable frames and dividers that stop the queen laying eggs in all the cells. Before then it was necessary to destroy a colony to collect the honey.
It was the Hittites, a Bronze aged people from Anatolia, who left the earliest written records of bee keeping, around 1300 BC. Their records included several legal punishments for honey thieves!

I could go on for hours about bee facts and the wonders of Bee keeping. But for today a snippet will do, together with the sight of my breakfast.